Barrel Fever by David Sedaris Read Free Book Online

movie the mother gathered the boy in her arms and stroked his head, offering words of comfort and staring off into the bright horizon that suddenly appeared before her.
    In the basement apartment my mother wrings out her sponge and says, “Lonely? You’ll find out what lonely is if you don’t quit acting like a goddamned monkey and get on the stick. Then you’ll see lonely.”
    A monkey? Bless her heart, my mother thinks I would be lonelier without her.
    “You’re the man now,” she said to me after my father died, “you’re the man.” Then she turned to Popeye, our calico tom, and said, “You’re the cat now, Popeye, you’re the cat,” as if she’d always worn a veil over her face and had never known we were men and cats all along.
    The night after his funeral my mother smashed the Pontiac windows with a golf club. I was in bed watching TV when I heard the noise and came running out barefoot in my robe thinking it was someone, some kids maybe, and there she was standing beside the car with this golf club. The windshield was webbed and sagging, and she stepped back to take another crack at it. There was a moth on her forehead. I took the club from her hands and said, “Mother, listen to me. This is our car. Why not the Dinellos’ or the Ablemans’?” She said she preferred the Pontiac as she was within the rights of the law to destroy her own property.
    Another moth, this one brilliant and spotted, lighted on her shoulder, and we all watched as the windshield heaved and collapsed, raining chunks like crushed ice onto the dash and front seat.
    We replaced the windshield with plastic as a temporary measure. I ride shotgun, my head out the window like a dog, while my mother drives slowly, cursing, the cigarette poking out of her mouth like a fuse. The drivers behind us grouse and honk their horns.
    “Listen to them,” my mother says, tightening her grip on the wheel, “all in a big hurry to meet some big stinking heart attack.” It embarrasses me that she cannot recognize herself in others. “The trick is not to allow yourself to be consumed by your anger,” she whispers between clenched teeth, her knuckles white. She says she would like to have his body exhumed so she can spit on it.
    “That’ll cost money.”
    “We’ll go there at night with shovels, just the two of us,” she says. “What’ll it cost?”
    I say, “He’s rotting flesh now, and long fingernails. You don’t want to see that.”
    “I would pay dearly to see a thing like that. Name your price.”
    That was months ago, before she developed her theory that he wasn’t really dead at all. During the latter period she spent a great deal of time behaving in a clairvoyant fashion. Placing her index fingers to her temples she would pronounce, “Right this minute he’s sitting beside a puddle — no, a pool. I see a swimming pool and a . . . checkered bathing suit, a wet bathing suit. I see a diving board and . . . what’s this? I see a cocktail napkin that reads . . . 'Fort Cheswick' — no, I take that back! It reads 'Port Selznick . . . Country Club.' There’s something written beneath it . . . something in very tiny letters. . . . I’m seeing the letter H . . . and the letter V and . . .” At this point she would surrender her head to the tabletop. “Goddamn you,” she would say. “I’ve lost it. I was this close, Dale, and then I lost it when you cracked that ice tray.”
    I would then pour my Pepsi and remind her that we had both seen his body after the accident. We saw his arm torn off at the shoulder and lying in a separate bag beside him.
    “He was in a drawer,” I’d say. “Normal, healthy adults do not choose to spend their time in a refrigerated morgue. If he had it in him to play this sort of joke, chances are we would have known it before now.”
    “He lied to me for fifteen years so why should I believe him flow? Maybe he’s alive with one arm. It happens.”
    My mother’s sister Margery refers to this as